I was sent an ai file that consists of a red rectangle w/ black stroke and two lines of white text w/o stroke centered on the rectangle. When I import it to cd the rectangle is fine but I get 3 instances of the text. 1 black then 1 white behind that then one black under the white. When I open it in illy it shows just one instance of text.
Ideas?
What version of Ai was it created in? What version of AI are you opening it in?
It does the same in the other direction sometimes too. An object with an outline will sometimes open in Illustrator as separate objects. One other thing about Illustrator though is that with the appearance palette, you can take a single object and add multiple outlines to it. One word with 3 outlines or more, or any number of effects stacked on an object. If you opened one of these in CorelDraw, I'd expect CorelDraw to break that apart into individual objects since it can't normally accommodate this.
Sounds like apples to oranges (AI to CD). what happens if you use pdf to bring it over to cd?
I have found that newer AI files opened in older versions of AI and then saved and opened in CD can have issues.
When it comes to the unique features of the two programs, apples and oranges is the appropriate analogy. There are also some differences with ai and pdf but problems still arise. If I save a file from CorelDraw X7 and open it in Adobe Illustrator, there are differences from ai to pdf. Sometimes better and sometimes worse. The two are never perfectly compatible.